Blubber-Bath: When Oregon Dynamited a Rotting Whale

Beachgoers at Oregon's Fort Stevens State Park stumbled across a rare sight last weekend: a beached sperm whale washed up on the northern Oregon Coast. The rare sight of such a large creature drew hundreds of visitors — myself included — to the coast on Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend to witness researchers perform a necropsy on the 8-ton juvenile right on the beach. The stench was overwhelming.

But I'm not writing you today about what happened to this whale. (Or about the second one which washed up 100 yards from the first just days later.) No. I want to tell you about the stranger-than-fiction story of a more famous incident on Oregon's coast. This is the story of the exploding whale.

On Nov. 9, 1970, a 45-foot sperm whale washed up dead on the southern Oregon Coast near the town of Florence. It was an unusual sight. It had been so long since the last whale beached in this part of Oregon that no one could remember how they disposed of the corpse.

It's an ugly sight when an 8-ton whale starts decomposing. Bacteria get to work on breaking it down from the inside out. Gasses start bubbling up and things get funky, fast. But it's also easy to imagine how it'd make for quite a show for curious beachgoers. After all, it's not often that we get to see nature like this up close.

Concerned about the potential of the whale bursting or inquisitive beachgoers falling through the rotting flesh into its fermenting gut stew, officials jumped into action to figure out a plan for disposing of the body. And that's where this story takes an interesting turn.

But first, join me for a quick detour down another road of Oregon history.

All 362 miles of the Oregon Coast are public. Thanks to a clever move by then Oregon Gov. Oswald West, a Democrat, the entire coast was declared a public highway in 1913, preserving access to it for all Oregonians.

But by 1966, a threat emerged to public access. A hotel owner in Cannon Beach, Oregon, decided to cordon off a section of the beach and make it exclusive to his property. It turned out that while West's legislation preserved the coast as a public right-of-way, it technically only covered the wet-sand portions of our shore. The owner of the Surfsand Motel sought to exploit that loophole.

Under the leadership of Republican Gov. Tom McCall, Oregon lawmakers passed our historic Beach Bill in 1967, closing that loophole and cementing the public's right to the entire coastline — from the line of vegetation to the sea. And though that bill eventually led to the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department taking over stewardship of our coast, in 1970 the state's Highway Division (now the Oregon Department of Transportation) was still in charge of all 362 miles.

This brings us back to the events of November 1970.

Officials with the Oregon Highway Division were determined to deal with the rotting carcass swiftly. There were a few options on the table:

• Bury the whale

• Cut the whale into smaller parts and then bury it

• Float it out to sea in hopes of it sinking

• Burn it

For one reason or another, officials rejected the first four options. Instead, the engineers – specialized in clearing roadways – proposed a unique plan of action: treat the 8-ton whale like a boulder and blow it up using dynamite. The idea was the charges would explode the whale into smaller pieces, which seagulls and other animals would dispose of.

Word of the plan quickly spread. On the morning of Nov. 12, 1970, a crowd gathered to watch the explosion. George Thorton, the engineer in charge of the project, placed a half-ton of dynamite under the whale carcass. But as Thorton told a journalist on scene at the event ahead of detonation, he wasn't sure exactly how much dynamite they'd need to effectively orchestrate this plan.

Still, they pushed ahead. His crew set up a 1/4-mile safety zone around the blast area, projecting that would keep all the spectators out of the line of any falling guts. At 3:45 p.m. PT on that day, they detonated the whale.

KATU journalist Paul Linnman was on the scene that day and captured the resulting blubber bath in this slice of journalism history. (Watch it. Trust me.)

It turns out, Thorton miscalculated. Twenty cases of dynamite wasn't enough to totally eviscerate the whale. Instead, it exploded the carcass into large chunks, shooting some as high as 100 feet into the sky.

"The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds," Linnman famously reported. The sky rained chunks of whale guts for several seconds after the explosion. It pelted spectators in smelly debris. One piece of the sperm whale crushed a car parked more than a quarter of a mile away.

In the end, officials wound up burying what remained of the corpse. But they couldn't bury the story. While the explosion only took a few seconds, the resulting mess was sealed in the permanent record through newspaper accounts and Linnman's famous broadcast. And it holds a strange place in the hearts and minds of Oregonians to this day. This famously environmentally minded state is full of people like myself, eager to crack a TNT joke at the first mention of a beached whale.

There's even a memorial to the events of that day.

To mark the 50-year anniversary of the explosion, the coastal city of Florance opened the Exploding Whale Memorial Park in 2021. Offering views of the Siuslaw River and the coast, near where the blast occurred, it's one of the many ways Oregonians continue to celebrate this odd moment of our shared history.

And one benefit of that messy day: Oregonians now know to keep road engineers far away from our whales, dead or alive. Instead, officials plan to let the ocean reclaim what remains of the juvenile sperm whale which washed up in 2023 nearly 200 miles up the coast from the 1970 incident.

🧠 Brain Food

If you listen to one thing this weekend, make it this: a fascinating conversation about a new trend, human composting. Yes, you too, can now have your body returned to the elements, like our dear whale friends. But only in certain states and locales. How does it work, and how did we conceive of such a modern burial process of embalming and entombing human remains? This episode of "Today, Explained" answers all your questions.

I'm a serial failed-language learner. Spanish. Mandarin. Arabic. American Sign Language. Even Farsi. I've spent up to several years attempting to learn each of these at various points in my life, and yet I speak (or sign) none of them. But I've always been fascinated by what I've heard about Duolingo. Could learning another language really be as easy as using an app and making a game out of it? It turns out, Duolingo may have succeeded way more at figuring out how to hook us on its dopamine drip than actually teaching us the ins-and-outs of languages.

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